The Time Complex Armen Avanessian

Post-Contemporary and Suhail Malik, eds

The Speculative
Time Complex
Armen Avanessian
and Suhail Malik

drawings by
Andreas Tpfer

Victoria Ivanova
Fractured Mediations
5
 Armen Avanessian
The basic thesis of the post-contemporary is that
time is changing. We are not just living in a new

Armen Avanessian and Suhail Malik

time or accelerated time, but time itselfthe
direction of timehas changed. We no longer
have a linear time, in the sense of the past being
followed by the present and then the future. Its
rather the other way around: the future happens
before the present, time arrives from the future.
If people have the impression that time is out of
joint, or that time doesnt make sense anymore,
or it isnt as it used to be, then the reason is, I
think, that they haveor we all haveproblems
getting used to living in such a speculative time
or within a speculative temporality.

Suhail Malik
Yes, and the main reason for the speculative
reorganization of time is the complexity and

The Speculative Time Complex

scale of social organization today. If the leading
conditions of complex societies are systems,
infrastructures and networks rather than
individual human agents, human experience loses
its primacy, as do the semantics and politics
based on it. Correspondingly, the present as the
primary category of human experiencein its
biological sentience at leastwhich has been the
basis for both the understanding of time and of
what time is (or, at least, what it is presumed to
be), also loses its priority in favor of what we could
call a time-complex. One theoretical ramification
of the deprioritization of the present we can
mention straightaway, but will need to return to

7
later, is that it is no longer necessary to explain
the movement of the past and the future on the
 The time-complex 2014). But the
is specific to the speculative time-
structures of complex is distinct
integrated socio-

Armen Avanessian and Suhail Malik

to Stieglers thesis in
technical and psychic that (i) it comprises
mnemic systems a speculative
of individuation constitution of
proposed by Bernard time rather than
Stiegler. See for memory and human
example Technics temporalization, and
and Time, 2: (ii) the speculative
Disorientation, trans. time-complex
Stephen Barker is here affirmed
(Stanford, CA: against Stieglers
Stanford University appeal to rescuing
Press, 2008) and an aesthetically-
Symbolic Misery constituted present, and the future enter into an economy
Volume 1: The experience of where maybe none of these modes is primary, or
Hyperindustrial individuation despite where the future replaces the present as the lead

The Speculative Time Complex

Epoch, trans. complexifying
Barnaby Norman sociotechnical
(Oxford: Polity, configurations.
basis of the present. We are instead in a situation
where human experience is only a part ofor
even subordinated tomore complex formations
constructed historically and with a view to what
can be obtained in the future. The past and the
future are equally important in the organization of
the system and this overshadows the present as
the leading configuration of time.
Complex societieswhich means more-
than-human societies at scales of sociotechnical
8
structuring aspect of time. This is not absolutely
new, of course: for a long time political economy
and social processes have been practically dealing
with the subordination of the human to the social
and technical organization of complex societies.
Equally, under the heading of Speculative
Realism, philosophy too has recently been trying
to reset the notion of speculation as the task of
finding more-than-human forms of knowledge
by establishing the conditions within conceptual
thought of knowledge of what is beyond human
experience. That project is certainly attached to
the conditions of the time-complex but is also
distinct to it

9
organization that surpass phenomenological
determinationare those in which the past, the
 AA
And to some concrete examples of the speculative
time-complex that we know from everyday

Armen Avanessian and Suhail Malik

experience or from daily news. These are
phenomena that usually start with the prefix pre,
like preemptive strikes, preemptive policing, the
preemptive personality

SM
Could you outline these phenomena?
AA
What has been called preemptive personality or
personalization is how you get a certain package
or information about what you might want that
you havent explicitly asked for from a commercial
service. We know a version of this from Amazon:
its algorithmic
Rob Horning, procedures give us
a productive or more pro-active manner.
Another thing, often criticized, is the politics
of preemptive strikes, which is also
a new phenomenon of the 21st century. Brian
Massumi and others have written about the
kind of recursive truth they produce: you bomb
somewhere and then afterwards you will find the
enemy you expected. You produce a situation
that was initially a

The Speculative Time Complex

Preemptive recommendations for Brian Massumi, speculation. The logic
personalization, books associated with Potential Politics here is recursive and,
The New Enquiry ones actual choices and the Primacy of to reiterate, the strike
(September 11, 2014), but the preemptive Preemption, Theory is not made in order
accessed on [http:// personality is one & Event, 10:2, 2007. to avoid something,
thenewinquiry.com/ step ahead: you get a deterrence before
blogs/marginal- a product that you the enemy strikes. Its also very different to the
utility/preemptive- actually want. The twentieth century logic of the balance of threats
personalization/]. companys algorithms or prevention. Rather, what happens in the
know your desires; present is based on a preemption of the future,
they know your needs even before you become and of course this is also linked to what has been
aware of them yourself. It doesnt make sense called a tendency towards premediation in
to say in advance that Ill send it back because the media.
it is likely that it will be something you will need. Another everyday example of this new
10

11
I dont think that all this is necessarily bad, but speculative temporality discussed a lot nowadays
we do have to learn how to deal with it in is preemptive policing. You have it in science
 fiction, notably with the PreCrime and precog
detection of Philip K. Dicks Minority Report (and
the Spielberg film based on it). Versions of this

Armen Avanessian and Suhail Malik

are adopted more and more in policing today.
This has to be distinguished from other current
surveillance strategies; for example, CCTV is more
of an older idea of watching what people are doing
or documenting what they have done, to reinforce
exclusion mechanisms. The question today, if one
puts it in chronological terms, seems to be more
along the lines: what kind of policing is needed to
apprehend people even before they do something,
with what they will doas if the future-position
promises more power, which creates a future-
paranoia? This is less a surveillance directed to
the exclusion of people than one that deals with
people inside the social space, with the value
they produce. How can they be observed and how
to extract value from their activities? There is of

The Speculative Time Complex

course a hugely important biopolitical factor in
this regulation of the population, especially with
regards to medicine and insurance.

SM
Along with pre-, whats advanced by the time-
complex is also a condition of the post, the
current ubiquity of which characterizes where we
are at now, and which is maybe added to with the
contention of the post-contemporary. Everything
now seems to be post- something else, which
indexes that our understanding of what is
happening now has some relation to but is also
disconnected to historically given conditions.
12

13
While the pre- indexes a kind of anticipatory
deduction of the future that is acting in the
 presentso that future is already working within
the now, again indicating how the present isnt
the primary category but is understood to

Armen Avanessian and Suhail Malik

be organized by the futurewhat the post-
marks is how whats happening now is in
relationship to what has happened but is no
longer. We are the future of something else.
The post- is also a mark of the deprioritization
of the present.
If we are post-contemporary, or post-
postmodern, post-internet, or post-whatever
if we are now post-everythingit is because
historically-given semantics dont quite work
anymore. So, in a way, the present itself is a
speculative relationship to a past that we have
already exceeded. If the speculative is a name
for the relationship to the future, the post- is its shaped by the future. For me, thats the key
a way in which we recognize the present itself problem and the key indication that the logic of the
to be speculative in relationship to the past. We contemporary with its fixation on the presentyou

The Speculative Time Complex

are in a future that has surpassed the conditions
and the terms of the past.
Combined, the present is not just the
realization of the speculative future (the pre-)
but also a future of the past that we are already
exceeding. As many contributors to this issue
propose, we dont quite have the bearings or the
stability or the conventions that the past offers
to us (the post-).
AA
Thats the important thing, that the change of
the present, the shaping of the present is not
necessarily determined by the past. The present
14
called it the human fixation on experiencethat
this presentism has difficulties or even completely
fails in dealing with the logic of being constituted
by the future.
I think thats partly the reason for all
the critical reasoning and questioning of
contemporaneity in recent years that happened
parallel to the so-called speculative turn.
Unfortunately, speculation is often discussed as
just a logical or philosophical issue but not in its
unique time aspect. But obviously we are also still
looking for the right philosophical or speculative
concepts for this post-contemporary (or past-
contemporary) condition or time-complex.

15
can no longer primarily be deduced from the
past nor is it an act of a pure decisionism, but
 SM
Yes, as much as we are each indebted in different
ways to speculative realism, and shared the
move away from the poststructuralist or late-
twentieth century models of philosophy that we
both come from, nonetheless speculative realism
has mostly argued for an intra-philosophical or
conceptual notion of speculation, which is to think
of the outside of thought and the experience of
thought. The interest of the post-contemporary is
to understand and operationalize the present from
outside of itself. I dont know at this point if that is
also outside of thought. But, in any case, the time-
complex can be thought, with speculation taken
primarily as a time-historical speculation, like
futurity, rather than an exteriority to experience
or an exteriority of thought. This brings us
much closer to current business and technical
operations rather than the conceptual demands
of speculative realism.
Operationalizing the
Speculative Time-Complex
SM
One instructive manifestation of the
operationalized speculative time complex is
derivatives. Of course, derivatives are now key to
speculative finance, and they are speculative
in that they use the unknown future price of an
asset and the risks involved therein to draw profits
16
against a present price. As Elena Esposito clearly
shows, with derivatives the uncertainties of the
Armen Avanessian and Suhail Malik
future are used to construct prices in the present
and this scrambles the standard time structure
of past-present-future. The derivative is a clear
example of how profits are not extracted on the
basis of production or from fixed capital like
equipment, plant and construction, all of which
depend upon the history of investment, nor from
variable capital like labor or wages. These belong
The Speculative Time Complex
to traditional industrial models of accumulation,
in which a factory is built, workers are employed
and paid, materials are used at a certain price,
a product made or grown, then sold at a higher
price than the costs, and profits made. All of
which means that the profits are accrued from
production that has happened in the past and
subsequently exchanged on the market. The
exchange of the product is the completion of a
sequence that must have already happened. With
the derivative model, on the other hand, a price in
the future which is yet to happen is anticipated,
and it is this future eventuality which is unknown
that is operationalized to extract profitson the
17
basis, to reiterate, of a future that is unknown
and unactualized.
 Armen Avanessian and Suhail Malik
For the divergence Derivatives are, pre-emptive personality and so on, which are
between production- in Natalia Zuluagas also anticipated through big data, and the use of
based models of price phrase, a specific kind algorithms through consumer information. But it

The Speculative Time Complex

and valuation and of future-mining, an also differs from the logic of preemption where,
those of derivative extraction from the taking the example of a preemptive strike, you
models, see Suhail future in the present, eliminate a possible enemy in order to prevent
Malik, The Ontology but this mining of the what might have happenedbut which also
of Finance: Price, future in the present may not. Its rather that your actprice setting
Power and the changes what the in the case of derivatives, but the construction
Arkhderivative, present is: the present is generalizableis itself modified because you
Collapse VIII: Casino isnt the one that you take this very proximate future into account as a
Real (Falmouth: started with. The condition of the act that should then be made. The
Urbanomic, 2014). very construction future is acting now to transform the present even
of a speculatively before the present has happened. As Esposito
constituted presentthe pre-actively argues, it is not only the linear schematic of time
puts the present into a past that it also is, the that is scrambled, but also the very openness of
post. Theres one version of this configuration the present to the future.
18

19
that you and others have described through But arent these conditions what you and
pre-emptive policing, pre-emptive strikes, Anke Henning were also dealing with in your
 Speculative Poetics project, be it more in relation
to formal literary and linguistic analysis?

Armen Avanessian and Suhail Malik

AA
See [http://www. Anke and I wanted to
spekulative-poetik. problematize certain
de/programmatik- initial assumptions,
der-reihe/english. such as the very easy
htmlhttp://www. and oversimplified
spekulative-poetik.de/ tension between
programmatik-der- speculative realism
reihe/english.html] and poststructuralism.
You and I also
Armen Avanessian sought to rework
and Suhail Malik, that opposition with
Genealogies of the essays collected
Speculation (London: in Genealogies of
Bloomsbury, 2016). Speculation, which
looks to vindicate a

The Speculative Time Complex

Armen Avanessian speculative dimension
and Anke Hennig, in the philosophy of
Present Tense. A the last decades.
Poetic (London: But, in particular, Anke
Bloomsbury, 2015). and I explored how
a prehistory of the
current speculative philosophy took up the idea
of speculative temporality.

SM
One of the things you and Anke do in Present
Tense, which is really important to emphasize
here, is to introduce grammar structures within
language as a kind of time-complex. Language
20

21
for you seems to be a cognitive, plastic and
manipulable medium of the time-complex.

AA
Language has one unique and key feature in
this regard: a tense system. The tense system
is really important to our understanding and
construction of time, even more fundamental
than the experience of time because it structures
that experiencethough not in a relativist sense.
Most continental philosophies of language or
time actually dont deal with what is specific to
this system because they dont really focus on
the grammar. Its a problem with phenomenology
as well as with a lot of deconstructivist and
post-structuralist philosophies. What is more
instructive than those traditions has been analytic
philosophy and non-Saussurean linguistics. For
example, John McTaggart and Gustave Guillaume
think a lot about sentences like every past
was a future and every future will be a past.
These basic structural paradoxesor apparent
structural paradoxescan be tackled via an
analysis of grammar. There are some important
technical issues here that I had better not
go into
22
Armen Avanessian and Suhail Malik
SM
Yes, maybe later. The core point seems to be
that formulations like every past was a future
and every future will be a past
AA
And so on: every present as well
SM
The Speculative Time Complex
Thats what I was going to say: whats very
relevant about those two formulations, in
particular to the identification of the speculative
time-complex we are here calling the post-
contemporary, is that they articulate a time
structuring in which the present drops out.
So determinations of time can be established
that dont require the present as their basis.
The tense structure of language allows for that,
formulating the non-necessity of the present as
a structuring condition of the tense structure.
AA
And what struck me as necessary for speculative
23
realism or any kind of speculative philosophy
was a better understanding of what I would call a
 speculative and materialist temporality. For Anke
and me, this meant understanding time on the
basis of the grammatical structures of language
language understood as something material
and to develop not a time-philosophy but rather
a tense-philosophy.
SM
At the same time, you make the criticism that
speculative realism, as we mainly have it, doesnt
take ordinary or literary language seriously
enough because it consigns it to correlationism
meaning, effectively, the dimension of human
experience that never leaves itself.
AA
Yes, but thats their self-misunderstanding.
SM
And why did you call it speculative poetics?
AA
Because our work also implies a polemic against
aesthetics and the general focus on aisthesis
[perception] in modern philosophy; and, to return
to your earlier point, also against the primacy
of experience.
SM
By constructive, do you mean that tense can
be operationalized in order to structure time
differently? The sentences formulating that the
past was the future and eclipsing the present
24
are not just descriptive. They also construct time
relations within language, especially through
Armen Avanessian and Suhail Malik
narrative. Does the same operationalization of
tense happen outside of human languages,
for example through the derivative structures
we mentioned?
AA
The point is rather that experience of time and
the construction of something like chronological
time are only effects of grammar, not a
The Speculative Time Complex
representation of the direction of time or of what
time really is. Its the tenses in language that
create an ontology of chronological time for us,
and we live this time as the illusion of having
a biography.
SM
Isnt this limitation of consecutive ordering what
the speculative time-complex surpasses? What
we have with the speculative time-complex is
that the future, which includes the future we dont
know, gets included within the current reckoning,
and the present is becoming disconnected from
the past. The dismantling of the linear ordering
25
and the primacy of the present equalizes past,
present and future.
 understanding of literature doesnt understand
that the present tense produces asynchrony.

Armen Avanessian and Suhail Malik

SM
Asynchrony?

AA
That the present is not fully experienceable but
is split in itself, and that tense structures can
actively operationalize this splitting. It is laden
with innumerable past-presents. It presents
actual phenomena as post-X phenomena and it
desynchronizes time.

Left and Right

AA Contemporaneity
Absolutely. Some of todays fiction and, more

The Speculative Time Complex

precisely, present-tense novels are far more SM
dangerous than traditional narrative in really This comes back to what we were saying earlier:
forcing time out of joint. As the result of 20th that the future itself becomes part of the present.
century vangardisms, present-tense novels This could be taken as an extension of the present
subject readers to a speculative somatics of time. without a future radically distinct from it. And
Maybe A.N. Whitehead would call this mode of it often is, with the leftist-critical claim of the
sentience feeling. This time does indeed feel loss of futurity under the capitalism of complex
hallucinogenic, haunting, urging, hyperstitious, societies. That is the fundamental limitation of
horrific, as David Roden shows in his contribution contemporary leftism
to this issue. In short, one feels times power For a notable that Nick Srnicek
coming from the future. In the most radical example, see Franco and Alex Williams
case this speculative feeling makes you change Bifo Berardi, After have identified, and
your life. Becoming on a par with the future you the Future, trans. which they look
have speculated initiates a metanoia. But this Arianna Bove et. al. to countermand
26

27
goes very far. The temporal phenomenon (Edinburgh: AK Press, with their specific
we were interested in is how all the aesthetic 2011). determination of what,
 in their contribution to this issue, they identify
to be a better future, which provides an active
horizon to direct the politics of the present.

Armen Avanessian and Suhail Malik

AA
I think we have a slight disagreement on the
current state of neoliberalism, which you define
as a state-business nexus directed to the
concentration of capital and power, which requires
and consolidates increasingly autocratic elites.
I tend to think that we are already going past
this stage. For me and others, neoliberalism
is a move toward something one can call
financial neofeudalism, in which key columns
or foundations of the political economy of
capitalismlike a safe nation-state, a governed
population and a market regulating itself, or There have been basically two responses to
other basic economic assumptions like economic this transformation. On the one side, there is
recovery or growth leading to more jobs or higher a right-wing or reactionary countermanding,

The Speculative Time Complex

profits leading to greater competition instead
of monopolies or oligopolies etc.have started
to disappear, and we are now in a fundamental
financial and social crisis, with increasing depth
of inequality.
But instead of debating whether we are
at a new financial feudalism or just another
stage in capitalism, lets instead focus here on
the basic hypothesis we are jointly proposing:
given the social, technological, and political
transformations since the 1960s and 70s
that weve already mentioned, and which are
also embodied in contemporary art and in
literature with the emergence and consolidation
28
looking toward the past as a kind of counter-
balance against the negative aspects that
everyone observes and feels: the frustrations,
disadvantages and mistakes of neoliberal
financial neofeudalism. The other standard
response to the speculative time structure is
the left or critical one, which is also the
prevalent one in contemporary art. The focus
here is not the past as a place of semantic
security but instead on the present as a site or
condition of resistance against the change to
a speculative time.
Yet, for all the contentions between left-
critical and right-reactionary responses to the

29
of the present tense novel in the period since, emergence of the neoliberal mobilization of the
we live in a new, speculative time structure. speculative time-complex, both are just playing in
 different ways into the hands of this new formation
of neoliberal capitalism, or financial feudalism.
Its perhaps more obvious with the right-wing

Armen Avanessian and Suhail Malik

reactionary tendencies, which in no way disrupt
but rather reinforce power structures that enabled
the new social, economic, political formation.
However, with left-critical reactions too, there
is a kind of suffocation, to the extent that most
people have the feeling of not being able to gain
traction in the present, to change something,
and to have something like a future worthy of its
name. Contemporary art is both a symptom and
surrogate of that futurelessness, with its constant
celebration of experience: aesthetic experience,
criticality, presentness and so on.

SM
That is an instructive formulation of typical left
and right reactions, and typical defensive moves

The Speculative Time Complex

around the emergence of the speculative time-
complex and the loss of bearings that it institutes
in relationship to both the past and the future.
Though there are many ways of understanding
or setting up a relationship to the speculative
time-complex, what the right does is to simplify
it, to reduce it as a complex, and to recenter it
on the present as the dominant moment on the
basis of tradition. The right has always done
this in modernity: if modernity is a paradigm in
which the new happens in the now, what has
characterized the right is a defense against the
emergence of the new as the basis for actions,
social organizations, aesthetics, meaning and so
30

31
on. The authority of past conditions is invoked
as a stabilization mechanism for modernization.

To be clear: the right is not necessarily against
modernization but stabilizes its disruptive
effects by calling on what are then necessarily
conservative or reactive historical formations.
And faced with operationalized speculative time-
complex of neoliberal capitalism, the right can
in a way carry on doing what it has always done
without necessarily recognizing that what it is
reacting against is no longer the modern but a
new condition.
The Rightism of neoliberalism makes sense
on this basis: even though I disagree with the
adequacy of the phrase financial neofeudalism
to describe what is happening in capitalism now,
it nonetheless serves to capture the increasing
32
autocracy that goes along with the neoliberal
restructuring. The political question then is
how that autocratic, post-democratic kind of
power is to be legitimized. The right is very useful
just here because what they endorse, essentially,
Armen Avanessian and Suhail Malik
is the authority of a recognized historical or
elite formation that stabilizes semantics
and perhaps only semanticsin the newly
established conditions.
AA
And the left-critical abreaction?
SM
In a way, leftism makes the problem of the
contemporary more evident because the left
in its progressive forms has been attached to
modernism. The now in which the new takes place
is the fetish for change for the progressive left,
exemplified by its revolutionary ideals and clichs.
The lefts abreaction to the speculative time-
The Speculative Time Complex
complex is to retrench the present as the venue
or the site for thinking about and confronting the
reconstitution of social and time organization,
and semantic reorganization too. Instead of
seeing the future as condition of the present, the
present is instead taken to extend out indefinitely
and cancel out the radically different future (the
revolution, notably).
But the speculative present as we are
identifying it is, by contrast to this leftist
melancholy, the entrenchment of the future and
the past which folds into the present, in a way that
certainly deprioritizes it and maybe even makes it
drop outas in the phrases demonstrating tense
33
structures we discussed earlier. The past was the
future, and the future will be the past.
 AA
There is no critical interruption from the present
in this speculative present.
SM
No, its constructed by the uncertainties of the
future and the absence of the past.
AA
Thats why the left-critical thinking of the event
or the emptiness or openness of the present
of contemporaneityis still vestigially modernist.
And, as Laboria Cuboniks remark in their
contribution from several different angles, its
not adequate to the tasks and conditions of the
twenty-first century.
SM
What the left sees in the speculative
complexification of time is an extension of the
present rather than its thinning out by the forcing
of the future or the disestablishment of the past.
Historical, futural, anticipatory relationships are
maintained with an emphatic insistence on the
presentness of action, aesthetics or experience.
This is an insistence on the contemporary. It
is still premised on the present as the primary
tense. And what happens with the emphasis on
contemporaneity is a determination of the present
as indefinitely extended. The contemporary is a
time form that saturates both the past and the
future, a metastable condition.
A leftism still attached to modernism wont
34
have traction on the speculative present, even if
that leftism is more attentive to the time-complex
than the right because its not trying to restore
a past (though its revolutionary wing does
seem largely interested in restoring a historical
Armen Avanessian and Suhail Malik
semantics, while its social-democratic wing now
maintains an interest in failed market solutions).
Even if its accepted that the left is more open to
modernity than the right (which is questionable
outside of the lefts self-reinforcing phantasm), it
holds that the present extends into both the past
and into the future, which supposedly destroys
the future as a future. And, as Esposito remarks
in her contribution to this issue, it doesnt see
that what it is actually involved with is the future
now. That today is tomorrow, as you put it in
an-other occasion.
AA
It was Tomorrow Today.
The Speculative Time Complex
See [https:// SM
viennabusines- Exactly. That title
sagency.at/cre- indexes how the
ative-industries/ speculative present is
curated-by-vienna/ in a pre-post formation,
about-curated-by- or post-contemporary.
vienna/concept/]. The present now is not
the time in which the
decisions are made or the basis for the new,
as it was in modernism. The new is happening
instead in a transition between a past and a future
that is not a unidirectional flux, but a speculative
construction in or from the directions of past and
present at once.
35
 AA
The whole idea of what in German is called
Zeitgenossenschaftthe contemporary, more

Armen Avanessian and Suhail Malik

literally, comrade of timeis problematic
because it far too often signifies the wish to
change the present completely with an insistence
on the present. The contemporaneity of
Zeitgenossenschaft indicates the idea of having
traction in the present by getting closer to it,
and that is no longer adequate to the task. It is
simply the wrong way to think. What is needed
instead is neither Gegenwartsgenossenschaft
comradeship of the present, nor
Vergangenheitsgenossenschaftcomradeship
of the past, but rather a Zeitgenossenschaft
from the future (die Zukunft), a kind of
Zukunftsgenossenschaft. We need to become This is really evident in contemporary art,
comrades with and of the future and approach which becomes a kind of last word in art.
the present from that direction. It cancels even its own futurity if not the future

The Speculative Time Complex

An Aesthetics of
Everything: Contemporary Art
Contra Futurity
SM
Under the guise of the contemporary the
modernist left has a kind of melancholia for a
future that it cancels to preserve its received
premise: the present. The past and the future
are taken as modifications of the present.
The advantage for left-criticality is that
36
in general for the sake of its own critical
accomplishments, which are of course capture-
mechanisms demonstrating contemporary
arts accomplishment.
AA
Contemporary art is a good example also
because it has not been just a victim of the
recent economic and political reordering of
neoliberalism, but has really helped build the
matrix of that reorganization by implementing
its logic on all levels from a left-critical angle.
Specifically, it has stressed the dominance of the
present or the past as condition for action, and

37
the contemporary can then accommodate, also, as we said before, individuated experience
dissimilate, colonize all of time in its own terms. as the main benefit of that reorganization. It takes
 the lead in a general aestheticization at all levels:
personal/individual creativity, originality etc.;
environment and cities as spaces of creativity and
disruptive entrepreneurialism; the conflation of
production and consumption with the prosumer,
whose natural habitat is, precisely, the smart
city itself turned into a kind-of continual biennial
event. All of this goes back to the fetishization of
presentness and of the aesthetic experience of
everyday life at the expense of its reconstruction,
which would be the task of poiesis or a poetics.
SM
Via the continued enrichment of experience
through an aesthetic encounter, contemporary art
also draws attention to specifics and particulars
at the cost of systemic understanding. Victoria
Ivanova draws attention to this operational logic
in her contribution to this issue, linking it to the
human rights regime as a kind-of counterpart
in global ordering that constructs the relation
between universality and particulars after the
so-called end of history.
Lets be clear that this is not a condition
of stasis: contemporary art is integrated into
neoliberalisms enrichment of experience for its
elite beneficiaries, and those thereabouts, in a
way that promotes change and revision. This is
part of the complexity of the speculative present
of neoliberal capitalist development: it looks like
a personal good, an enrichment of experiment
by aestheticization, by promoting change while
maintaining a certain stability
38
Armen Avanessian and Suhail Malik
AA
An aesthetic experience not just of art, but of
everything.
SM
Yes, the aestheticization of experience, or
experience as an aesthetic. That is also a
generalization of ethics too: the appreciation of
differences without political demand, a kind of
The Speculative Time Complex
superliberal
AA
De-politicization
SM
A depoliticization because its a de-systematization.
Such an aesthetic/ethical appreciation is
a repudiationindirectly made, as a kind
of background conditionagainst making
systemic determinations. The latter are held to
be too complex to be apprehended or reworked,
impossible or just wrong-headed because
totalitarian. What we are obliged to be restricted
39
to are instead only the singularities of what is and
of experiences. That is certainly the injunction of
 contemporary art, operating via each artwork and
its social norms. And to that extent it is a minor
but paradigmatic model for a neoliberal sociality,

Armen Avanessian and Suhail Malik

as Ivanova remarks.
The way in which contemporary art becomes
a plaything for big power in neoliberalism, despite
many of arts critical content claims against that
model of domination, this convergence makes
coherent sense on this basis. But what needs
to be emphasized here is that rather than
just remaining at the level of the conflation of
varieties of anarcho-leftism in contemporary
arts critical claims with the rightist interests
of increasingly concentrated capital and power,
the two can be seen to have common interests in
flattening out or simplifying the speculative time
complex, as reactive detemporalizations of the
speculative present.
What is necessary against these and other

The Speculative Time Complex

such reactions is to have strategies and praxes
and that means theoriesto gain traction in the
speculative present. And that is what both right-
wing conservative strategies and left-critical
or aesthetic approaches are utterly incapable
of doing. As weve said, both are combined in
contemporary art which is then also incapable of
doing anything but consolidating this condition,
no matter what it claims to do, what it pretends
to do, or what its content claims are.

AA
We agree that we have to think and act within
40

41
a post-contemporary speculative time-complex.
But now the question is: how to differ from
 the capitalist or financial-feudalistic version
of it? How does a speculative theory introduce
a difference into the speculative present from

Armen Avanessian and Suhail Malik

its exploitative formation by neoliberalism,
however else we might characterize that form of
domination? What would be a speculative politics
capable of accelerating the time-complex, in the
sense of introducing a difference to it?

SM
That is the fundamental political question, for
sure. One further theoretical point might help us
understand the difficulties here. Namely, why is
our wish to get past contemporaneity not just
Jacques Derridas criticism of the metaphysics of
presence? For Derrida, presence is the primary
category of western metaphysics, circumscribing
not just the main philosophical doctrines in the being deconstructed: Metaphysics needs to be
Western tradition but also correlative prevailing deconstructed and it deconstructs itself all the

The Speculative Time Complex

social, political and language formations. And
Derrida proposes that the present held to be
adequate to itself needs to be dismantled and
reconstituted. For him, the task is to deconstruct
presenceontologically, in time, space, and so
on. We are contending that that contemporaneity
is no less an extended social historical present,
presentification. So, in a way, arent we just doing
Derrida again, even though he is a key figure in
the critical lineage that needs to be surpassed?
AA
Its not the worst thing to be repeating Derrida
to some extent. But with his deconstruction, its
42
time, so its an unending procedure. Unfortunately,
this goes down all too well with a tedious modernist
aesthetic of the negative, not so far away from the
fetishes of Frankfurt School, of the non-identical,
or of a diffrance that plays with the opposition
between meaning or content, traditionally the bad
thing, and subtraction, which is the good thing,
as are emptiness and non-readability. And I think
thats a very modernist, twentieth-century logic,
and also the logic of the contemporary. Contrary to
all such attempts, the reworking of the speculative
present must admit that meaning is always there
anyway, and the constant procedure of changing
and subtracting it endorsed by Derrida and the

43
a necessarily ongoing process of the ideology or lineage of critique he belongs to is not necessarily
effect of presentness establishing itself and also something positive.

So, with deconstruction and most other strands
of last centurys aesthetic philosophy, whatever
its other merits are, you end up in an aesthetics
that is an ongoing celebration of the gesture of
interruption, of emptying out, and so on (just think
of some of Badious tedious disciples). But with the
speculative time-complex we are no longer in that
logic of interruption. I dont have a problem with
an ontology of time, as long as it gives us another
possibility of understanding time than via the
present.
SM
You are right to say Derrida ends up in an
aesthetics. But it is also an ethics, with its
emphasis of an always singular and irreconcilable
experience of vulnerability. He rails against
44
established meaning.
AA
We should not be afraid of establishing meaning.
On the contrary.
Armen Avanessian and Suhail Malik
SM
Certainly. I dont know if my additional observation
is compatible with your response, but its that
the construction of the speculative time-complex
is the societalmeaning mainly technical and
economicoperation of the deconstruction of
presence. That is, the way that semantics or
instrumental operations are occasioned in time-
complex societies is precisely the deconstruction
of presence and meaning in the way that Derrida
affirmed. We are then no longer in a metaphysics
of presence because of the speculative time-
complex. Derrida speaks to this somewhat
in his discussion of teletechnologies and the
displacements of space, locality, and ontology
The Speculative Time Complex
that are involved. But the politically difficult and
mostly evaded point in
Jacques Derrida these discussions is
and Bernard Stiegler, that the sought-after
Echographies deconstruction of time,
of Television: meaning and so on are
Filmed Interviews actually taking place
(Cambridge: Polity, though processes of
2002). capitalization. The they
of the state-business
nexus effectuate that deconstruction, and they
do it better than Derrida. In this light, what the
contemporary enforces is the retrenchment
of presence against its deconstruction by the
45
speculative time-complex. Contemporaneity
here includes all the procedures of interruption,

subtraction, delay and non-identity you mention,
as well as many others including semantic
deconstruction.
Grammar of the
Speculative Present
SM
To return to your question: in contrast to the
sorry complex of right and left reactions to the
speculative present that is contemporaneity
in art and elsewhere, what is needed is a way
to engage with the time-complex that is not
just about drawing profits and exacerbating
exploitation on this revised basis, as neoliberalism
46
has so successfully done. That capitalized
formation of the time-complex is a kind of limited
and restricted organization of the speculative
present; one that for all of its complexity reverts
to presentification because the profits have to
Armen Avanessian and Suhail Malik
be accumulated now as per the short-termism of
neoliberal capitalism.
AA
The problem is that one has to admit that the
social, technological, political and economic
formation of neoliberalism has an advantage
in part because it acts within the speculative
temporality, in part as it has established
institutions functioning in accordance with this
speculative logic. But the neoliberal formation
also reduces the speculative dimension of the
time-complex because it repudiates the openness
or contingency of the future as well as the present.
SM
The Speculative Time Complex
No, I disagree. I think the problem precisely is
that it opens up more societal and semantic
contingency. That is what Ulrich Beck and others
involved in the notion of risk societies diagnosed
in the 1990s on other terms. What they call risk
is the acknowledgement
Ulrich Beck, Risk in the present of how
Society: Towards the speculative time-
a New Modernity, complex opens up the
trans. Mark Ritter, future as the condition
(London: SAGE, for a societal order
1992). (more accurately,
a quasi-order).
47
AA
No, no. The contemporary is a constant
 production of innovations and differences, but it
doesnt introduce a difference to the recursive
movement of time. The German allows for
distinction between Beschleunigung, which is
acceleration as a speeding up, and Akzeleration.
The latter really means something like, in the
old days, when a clock was too fast. A deviation
aheadnot a circular movement, but a recursive
one. Akzeleration introduced a kind of difference
to the functionality of the clock. And its this
difference that the neoliberal or neofeudal
economic system hardly allows for, because it
produces an automatized future. While the kind
of criticism typical of the contemporary (left) art
is not wrong, it doesnt see the possibilities of
speculative time and reduces it to the present. It
just sees the capitalist effects of it. Contemporary
critical art mostly produces differentessentially,
decorativeobjects or meanings that maintain
the reduced form of the speculative time-complex.
And I am arguing not on the level of just semantic
meaning, but really on the level of the materiality
of language and the materiality of time, which are
not separable.
SM
So the task of the post-contemporary against
contemporaneity is to change time?
AA
The post-contemporary works within the
speculative present. It understands it, it practices
it, and it shapes our temporality. Are there
48
alternative actualizations of the speculative
or asynchronous present; are there different
Armen Avanessian and Suhail Malik
readings of it? In her contribution, Aihwa Ong
highlights some of these constructions in her
anthropology of what she calls cosmopolitan
science. She outlines how the universalisms
and abstractions intrinsic to scientific
entrepreneurialism support and are supported
in Asia by specific historical-culture formations
of meaning, scrambling any simple opposition
between local and universals, or between
The Speculative Time Complex
past (culture) and future (entrepreneurial
technoscience). With speculative poetics, to
take another example, the issue is how do we
understand the future in an open way and not just
as a kind of indicative future.
SM
What do you mean by indicative?
AA
There are three modes in grammar: the imperative
(Go!), the indicative (She goes.), and
the conjunctive (I could go.). In language
philosophybut also politicallyits important
49
to understand that all tenses are modal. The
past and the present have to be understood in
 a modal wayprimarily as indicative. But the
future tense and the conjunctive mode are pretty
close in that they both deploy the grammar of

Armen Avanessian and Suhail Malik

possibility. It is this contingency that is reduced
by the logic of the contemporary logic and is often
misunderstood by the closure of speculative time
to the present (I will have gone). But, if I may
get a bit more into the technical analysis, the
conjunctive is constructed before you are actually
going, so whether you are using the conjunctive
mode or the future tense in the present you are
not yet going. Maybe thats too technical for here,
but the main point is that mode is how a future
tense is transformed into a present tense and
subsequently into a past tense.

SM
Is the conjunctive the form of contemporaneity?
What it sets up is a sense that actions could

The Speculative Time Complex

have happened, but did not happen: they would
or could go, but they didnt. And this is a sense
where the subject of the sentence is left with a
potentiality, which is unrealized.
That makes sense of the celebration of
potentiality everywhere across the critical
left today, and also, again, the limitation of the
speculative time-complex to the domination by
the present. Claims in contemporary art and
contemporaneity are emphatically limited only to
setting up options with potentials, without actually
doing anything or mobilizing the speculative
present to construct a future. The future is only
and just a set of potentials that must never be
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51
actualized for fear of instrumentalization and,
paradoxically and self-destructively, realizing
 in any present a future radically distinct from
the present.

Armen Avanessian and Suhail Malik

AA
The reduction of the time-complex to
contemporaneity does not understand the future
to be contingent but the only possible future
present that becomes real; in grammatical terms,
the future or the present here are understood only
via the indicative. But the present is not just an
is, just as tenses dont represent time. We have
to get rid of an a-modal understanding of time.

SM
The contemporary is a-modal?

AA its by preemptive policing or derivatives. More

Yes, and what is needed instead for a thinking and generally, we have to understand that language
praxis adequate to the speculative temporality changes meaning and timeand on a material

The Speculative Time Complex

we live ina Zukunftsgenossenschaft as I called
it earlierare means for transforming a future
tense into a present tense. Thats why for me
grammar is a way of understanding speculative
time in its openness, instead of subjecting it
exclusively to the indicative mode. A future
happens in the present only if a conjunctive is
successfully realized, which happens by way of an
imperative. In between I could go (present tense
conjunctive) and I go (future tense indicative) is
the hidden command Go! (imperative).
For me, its exactly this grammatically
organized difference that opens up not just a
different future and the possibility to do and
52
and ontological level, not just on a linguistic or
conceptual level. These complexes can be tackled
via grammatical analyses.
SM
OK, but as nearly all the contributions to this
issue demonstrate, we also need to generalize
the construction of the time-complex beyond
language and its grammar. The conditions
we are talking about are made of the broad
infrastructures and systemics of the speculative
present in large-scale integrated societies.
Esposito identifies a scrambling of the time-
line against its received and modernist logics

53
act differently in the present instead of being that suggests a new openness to the future,
subjected to an automatized future, whether which is to the advantage of a relatively new kind

of capital accumulation but can be mobilized
otherwise. Ivanova makes the case for how
a new global juridico-political quasi-order is
constructed via unstable restagings of the
relations between particulars and universals,
while Srnicek and Williams look to the systemic
techno-social advance of robotics and automation
to transform the fundament of the capitalist
rendering of human activity. Benjamin Bratton
extends these possibilities under the rubric of
Speculative Design to more specific scenarios
and, simultaneously, along longer time-lines; Ong
also takes up the jurisdictional and operational
issues in the specific case of the fabrication
of a scientific enterprise that makes sense in
ethno-cultural terms in Asia, transforming the
practical manifestations of where and how identity
54
formation takes place. Laboria Cuboniks wrestle
with the legacies of feminism given just such
futural and technoscientific reorganization of
bodies, identities, and concepts of selfhood; and
Roden scrambles body, affect, language in light
Armen Avanessian and Suhail Malik
of a Disconnection Thesis according to which
the kinds of intelligence inaugurated by Artificial
General Intelligence completely change the space
of coding at any and every order.
In general, and similarly to the insufficiency
of experience as a basis for apprehending
the speculative present, the constructions of
(presumably only some) human languages is
only part of this integrated complex but not
wide enough as a mechanism to meet the broad
material and semiotic condition.
AA
We need more than a language theory, for sure,
but in any case we need what I call a poetic
understanding which, for me, is informed by
The Speculative Time Complex
language theory instead of an aesthetic one.
SM
My divergence is that, first, even taking poetics
as a name for production in general, it still
seems to me to be too tied into the structures
and affordances of more or less ordinary human
language and their ordering. Thats of course
a fundamental condition of the systemic,
social, technological, economic structuring
and mediation necessary for large-scale
organization. So, while poetics as you present
it gives us as human linguistic actors a way of
reordering the speculative time-complex in other
55
formats than the kind of repressive mechanisms
of contemporaneity and what you identify as
 the indicative, its also necessary that the On Speculative Design
restructuring are operationalized also in Benjamin H. Bratton
non-linguistic terms. We have to open up the
time-complex in its infrastructures that are more

Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek

structured in terms other than those of human
languages. This is what Brattons proposal of
Speculative Design in this issue puts forward in
concrete ways and with specific situations and
time-lines, not least with his identification of
The Stack, which rearranges sovereign power
according to the material and infrastructural
conditions of computation that is interconnected
at a planetary scale. Even more generally,
however, we need a grammar adequate to the
expansive infrastructure of the time-complex in
its widest formation.

Revised transcript of
a conversation held in

What is at Stake in the Future?

Berlin, 29 January 2016.
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